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You often ask me, Justus Fabius, how it is that while the genius and the fame of so many distinguished orators have shed a lustreon the past, our age is so forlorn and so destitute of the glory of
eloquence that it scarce retains the very name of orator. That title indeed
we apply only to the ancients, and the clever speakers of this day we call
pleaders, advocates, counsellors, anything rather than orators. To answer
this question of yours, to undertake the burden of so serious an inquiry,
involving, as it must, a mean opinion either of our capacities, if we cannot
reach the same standard, or of our tastes, if we have not the wish, is a
task on which I should scarcely venture had I to give my own views instead
of being able to reproduce a conversation among men, for our time,
singularly eloquent, whom, when quite a youth, I heard discussing this very
question. And so it is not ability, it is only memory and recollection which
I require. I have to repeat now, with the same divisions and arguments,
following closely the course of that discussion, those subtle reflections
which I heard, powerfully expressed, from men of the highest eminence, each
of whom assigned a different but plausible reason, thereby displaying the
peculiarities of his individual temper and genius. Nor indeed did the
opposite side lack an advocate, who, after much criticism and ridicule of
old times, maintained the superiority of the eloquence of our own days to
the great orators of the past.